In a word, she plugs into your unconscious fantasies, the images and empathies that swirl through the nether reaches of your mind.
The same principle applies where fictional characters, story people, are concerned. One after another, you sort through their assorted possibilities hunting for one who turns you on—which is to say, fits your private quirks and standards—where the particular role you’re casting is concerned.
This business of finding characters who turn you on is important on a variety of levels. Not the least of these, often overlooked, is the fact that when you begin any fiction project, you’re committing yourself to living with the story people involved for what may develop into a considerable period of time. The classic example is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. Doyle eventually became so weary of writing about Holmes that he killed him off in the famous scene at the Reichenbach Falls—and then, to placate outraged readers, was forced to bring him back to life again for endless further stories.
With that in mind, you can see how vital it is not to trap yourself into working with a character you find drab or boring or tiresome. Even a short story can drag on interminably if your protagonist—or any other major player, for that matter—puts you to sleep. So keep on with your searching and shuffling until you spotlight someone who both fits your story’s requirements and excites you.
You may be surprised at that person. Once, for me, it was a dragon-riding warrior with blue skin. On another occasion a Cretan princess, Ariadne, caught my private spotlight. Same for a crippled World War II veteran named Tomczik; and an Indonesian Dutch girl, Anita Van Pelt of Djaimaling; and Mr. Devereaux, a footloose gambler in the pioneer West. For mystery writer Lawrence Block there was a man who couldn’t sleep; for Tony Hillerman, his Navajo neighbors in New Mexico. John D. MacDonald came up with a “knight in slightly tarnished armor” named Travis McGee who lived aboard a Florida houseboat called the Busted Flush. Victor Hugo found fascination in a hunchback, Quasimodo. Shakespeare won immortality with such diverse figures as Hamlet, Juliet, Falstaff, and Lady Macbeth—she of the bloodstained hands.
Now the point of all this is that, actually, “finding” a character means personifying—that is, giving human form to—aspects of yourself that you like, or dislike, or wish you had. For at root we’re all writing about ourselves. Or, to put it even more pointedly, all your characters are you.
A conscious process? Seldom. Most of us don’t know ourselves that well. But we do, in the phrase, “know what I like.” When, for whatever reason, a flash of excitement strikes us as we grope for a character on which to hang our current project, we recognize it—which is to say, it stirs and rouses us to some degree or other, thus encouraging us to explore it further and, if that stimulates us even more, to develop it in greater depth. Tarzan was born this way, I have a feeling. So were Moll Flanders, and Oliver Twist, and D’Artagnan, and James Bond, and Scarlett O’Hara, and Dr. Fu Manchu. Such story people come into being only if they fascinate Writer as well as Reader.
IMPROVING YOUR PERFORMANCE
Can you improve your performance in this area—increase your flash-of-excitement ratio?
Indeed you can. The trick is to explore your own reactions until you find what stimulates them most. Music often proves effective—I created any number of science fiction people to the dark strains of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.
The company of particular people can help, too. So can the right—for you—reading matter. I have a horror-aficionado friend who finds endless inspiration in an old Charles Addams book, Dear Dead Days. A woman romance specialist of my acquaintance wouldn’t miss the lonely hearts columns for the world. The photos in the movie magazines and the Academy Players Directory are cherished by many a writer, and there are clinical psychologists who swear by the much-debated Szondi Test, with its pictures of European psychiatric patients, as a means of probing their clients’ psyches.
Whatever your approach, the important thing is to let yourself go, via free association and sans self-censorship. For as the late Howard Rodman, a superior TV writer, once commented, “A writer must not be judgmental. Look at people and love them, good and bad, interesting and dull. Cherish them, for they are the stuff of which your writing will be made.”
How do you adapt the characters you zero in on to your story?
Alfred Hitchcock put it well: “First you decide what the characters are going to do, and then you provide them with enough characteristics to make it seem plausible that they should do it.”
In a word, you rationalize their presence and behavior.
Regrettably—and, too often, disastrously—many beginning writers fail to realize this. Shaped by the pseudo-profundities of academics, analysts, and critics, they have been conditioned to believe that characters are, in effect, real people, who exist independently of the situation.
Of course, story people aren’t real. They exist only in the writer’s head. (Which isn’t to say that they may not become so real to him, in the course of his imaginings, that he tends to think of them as actual living, breathing human beings.)
This being the case, the writer’s job where characters are concerned is to create (spell that “dream up”) story people whom he can comfortably make behave in an interesting manner and do interesting things in situations, circumstances, or contexts readers find interesting—yet at the same time keep the story credible and the story people believable.
Part of this is pretty much mechanical, of course. We’ll take it up in detail later. But the heart of character building is a good deal more involved and subtle. It centers on the writer’s ability to figure out why the character thinks and does the things he does.
To attach a previously mentioned word to this ability, the writer rationalizes the character’s behavior.
What is rationalization?
Rationalize: to provide plausible (but not necessarily true) reasons for conduct. To attribute (one’s actions) to rational and creditable motives without analysis of the true and especially unconscious motives.
You’ll probably understand this better if you know how I came to my present way of thinking.
My professional involvement with writing began as a young reporter, covering everything from police to garden parties, city hall to civic clubs.
After a few years, that palled. I began to write fiction, and characters came to be an issue. Where did they come from? What shaped their fantasies, their foibles, their thinking? How did you motivate them believably? And so on.
Well, finding them was no problem. My years as a reporter had taken care of that . . .
Item: The aging, small-time storekeeper whose illegitimate son was a world-famous surgeon.
Item: The allegedly happy, married man in his early thirties whom the police knew as a peeping Tom.
Item: The dowdy housewife who had been a gangster’s moll.
. . . not to mention the fashionable kleptomaniac, the drunken banker, the transvestite executive, and all the rest.
I knew better than to use any of these estimable ladies and gentlemen in toto, you understand. That way lies disaster, in terms of legal action for everything from libel to invasion of privacy to advanced mopery.
Besides, real people will never meet all your story needs. You must adapt them to fit the picture you’re trying to create. But it’s no chore to combine them in bits and pieces—the hair from one, another’s waistline, an eye-cast or lisp or pride or prejudice or sniffle from a third.
The problem is, what made these real people tick? Certainly you couldn’t tell by looking, because each and every one of them wore a mask. Often, it was questionable if even they themselves knew. And when I asked three respected psychotherapists what motivated these people, I got three different answers.
At that point, a fascinating fact dawned on me: As regards what made my people tick, no one knew. No one could say for even halfway sure what went on behind those masks—not even the people wearing the masks. When Joe attributed his sticky
fingers to childhood poverty, or Hannah said her promiscuity dated back to seduction by an uncle at age eight, or Dr. Carlson argued that Sam exposed himself to little girls because of deep-seated feelings of insecurity where adult women were concerned, each was simply rationalizing—making up a plausible, semi-logical, but not necessarily true explanation for aberrant behavior.
This was equally true for the Reverend Mr. Dunbar, who claimed he’d seen an angel in a vision, and Tom Resnick, whose fidelity to his wife was well-nigh legendary, and Susan Garland, who spent her Sundays visiting the sick and lonely.
Not that any of these people’s beliefs, estimable or otherwise, were necessarily wrong, you understand; quite possibly they were right on target. It’s just that there was no way, no way whatever, that you could prove or disprove them. Indeed, it was entirely possible to advance other, equally plausible hypotheses to account for each individual’s behavior. The Behaviorists could give you one interpretation, the Freudians another, and the Evangelicals yet a third.
Which in turn meant that, for me as a fiction writer, character conception and development took on an entirely new and different twist than I’d originally expected. Specifically, it meant that, within the bounds of my imagination, I was free to create any kind of character I wished, and have him do anything I might conceive, provided only that I rationalized the character’s behavior in such a manner that readers believed it.
What goes into rationalization? Perhaps another example from my newspaper days will help to clarify the process.
I was interviewing a particularly cold-blooded murderess in jail that day. Finally the session was over. Thanking Murderess, I got up to go.
“That’s OK,” she shrugged. “But ain’t it hell we had to meet in here?” Her gesture summed up the cell’s vomit-green walls, the bars, the strap-iron cot. “What a hell of a party we could have had if we’d been outside!”
Her words sent a chill through me. I mean, my psyche was terrified. Because in that moment I found pictures flashing through my head of how a trusting boyfriend, dancing with her, had died.
More to the point, it dawned on me how completely she and I lived in two different worlds.
That matter of private worlds—it’s a subject to which I’ve given a lot of thought in the years since then. From it, increasingly, I’ve gained insight into what a writer does . . . the difference between the storyteller and other people.
Specifically, in the act of thinking through a story, the writer temporarily suspends his own standards and adopts those of someone else. That’s what a writer does when he creates a character. Because he’s in the character-creation business, he must learn to put his own beliefs and attitudes in limbo temporarily and adopt those of someone else: the person about whom he’s writing, the character he’s creating.
Or, if you want to put it in the bluntest possible terms, he must become a hypocrite, a person who pretends to personal qualities or principles not actually possessed.
LIVING IN PRIVATE WORLDS
That’s what I’d done where Murderess was concerned. For the sake of insight and a good story, I’d tried to put myself in her place, pretended to see her situation through her eyes. And I’d done it convincingly enough that she’d assumed we were on the same wavelength to a degree that, under different circumstances, might have led to parties.
Such affectation of empathy isn’t limited to writers, of course. Actors share it with us, and so do lawyers and con men and spies and undercover police agents and really successful salesmen. The writer who’s unable to simulate it faces an almost impossible task, for certainly his characters ever and always will lack the breath of life.
And there’s the heart of the matter. Consciously or unconsciously, by nature or by learning, the writer must have or acquire the ability to put himself in another, perhaps unlikely person’s place. Sometimes empathy will come in a flash, through intuition or osmosis. A character may spring into being full blown, alive and breathing from the moment of conception. More often, in whole or in part, he and his situation will have to be constructed, fabricated . . . built in steps or stitches through the writer’s skill at rationalization. But whatever the process, it remains at the heart of the matter.
Do you see the implications of such thinking? Simple and obvious though it be, it provided me with a map for any road I wished to travel . . . gave me a key to unlock the secrets, thinking, and mysteries of any and all story people.
Beyond this, character is also inextricably linked to context. Separated from situation, it becomes meaningless. Sans puzzles to solve, Sherlock Holmes fades to a shadow figure and holds little interest. Patty Hearst minus the Symbionese Liberation Army is hardly memorable, and neither is Moses unchallenged by an enslaving Egypt, Romeo and Juliet cut loose from the feud between Montagues and Capulets, Captain Queeg apart from the Caine, or Hercules without his Labors.
Your unconscious knows this. In consequence, and whether you will it or not, it sees each character that flashes by within the framework of a circumstance, a situation. Instinctively, it conceives and measures your story people against the demands made by particular roles and functions. Out of hand, it rejects the dullard, the weakling, the distasteful—unless that kind of person is what the story demands, or unless some quirk that can give them life and color has caught your fancy.
That being the case, in all likelihood you’ll find that automatically, spontaneously, you’ll conceive your people in context.
It will help you in all of this if you’ll teach yourself to think in terms of your own likes and dislikes. These are always your basic raw material when it comes to character construction. In the manner of a “method” actor, search your past for memories vibrant with emotion—experiences that still have the power to stir your blood, quicken your breathing. Now is the time to make those moments of pain, rapture, and humiliation pay off. What spurred them in the first place? What made you cringe, or catch your breath, or burn with shame to the very roots of your hair?
Why? Because these reactions are something you share with the whole human race—not the experiences that evoked them necessarily, you understand. Your agonies of grief may reflect a puppy you lost in childhood rather than the anguish of a husband as the clods thud on his dead wife’s coffin. The rage that still knots your belly, when you let yourself think about it, is quite possibly the product of a girl’s casually contemptuous laugh, not the frenzy of being falsely accused of treason or the fury of seeing your daughter’s murderer go free.
What counts, then, is that you feel—and feeling makes you kin to all mankind.
It also links you to your story people. It’s the core of character we talked about in Chapter 1.
This fact was driven home to me by the experience a friend of mine had a few years ago. It involved a lady named Clarice.
Clarice’s trade was pornography. She was a writer of what in the trade were known as “docs”—pseudo-sociological paperbacks that pretended to be scholarly and factual and that bore titles like Aggression, Repression and Rape, Secretaries and Sex, and The Lesbian Housewife—that kind of thing.
At the moment, Clarice had an idea for what she swore would prove an all-time best seller. But she felt she needed a collaborator, and my friend was elected.
Her idea? To produce what she referred to as a “turn-on” book.
“Everyone in this world is trying to score,” she explained. “Trouble is, they don’t know how. The men can’t figure out what turns women on, what turns them off. Vice versa for the women. So they jump the track, make wrong moves, do things that upset the apple cart.”
“So where do I come in?” Friend asked.
“Isn’t that obvious?” Clarice patted him on the knee. “Kelsey, you’re all the men in the world. I’m all the women. So, you spell out what women do that turns you on, what turns you off. I do the same for men. So what if we aren’t one hundred percent on target? We’ll hit often enough that the customers will more than get their money’s worth.�
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Well, they never did get around to writing the book. But Clarice’s logic, the principle on which her turn-on book was to be based, remains sound: Certain aspects of human behavior rate positive with the vast majority of members of our culture. Others come through as negative. So if you set up your characters with these in view, you’ll improve your odds in favor of winning favorable reader reaction.
In practical terms, this means your first step towards creating an effective character is to look around for people who rouse strong feelings in you. People you admire, one way or another. People you like. People that bother you or baffle you or that you detest. People who intrigue you. People you envy, or with whom you’d like to trade places—not just in terms of situation or status, but of attributes.
Your next step is to ask yourself, considering the kind of story you want to write, might any of these people, these attributes, fit in? Is there a woman you wish you knew? A man who has the qualities—unlikely qualities, quite likely—that might fit a different hero? Can you conceive a unique villain, or band of villains—remember the Alec Guinness film, The Lavender Hill Mob, or Jack Bickham’s The Over-the-Hill Gang?
None of these may strike a note, you understand. I never said writing was easy. But at least now you know what you’re looking for: the character who turns you on, excites you. And yes, you’ll find that character, if you keep hunting.
Whereupon, you’ll move on to Character No. 2. A compatible character, of course, one who fits in with Character No. 1 on one level or another.
And then to Character Nos. 3 and 4 and 5 and any others you may need. And no, quite possibly you won’t do them one by one as I have here. You play it by ear, juggling and manipulating and balancing one of your group against another, until you’ve got a cast that has you so high you just can’t wait to work with it.
Not that that’s all there is to this business of searching out your characters. Far from it. But it’s a start, a first step, and experience will teach you what comes after.
Creating Characters: How to Build Story People Page 2
